Archives for April 2020

In between the July 1981 release of Pleasant Dreams and the February, 1983 release of Subterranean Jungle, I got to see the Ramones in concert for the first time.

Sadly, it wasn’t at a small, sweaty club, but rather a massive, sweaty outdoor venue: the first US Festival on September 3, 1982. The Ramones were part of the quote-unqote New Wave day, sharing the stage with a bunch of other great bands including Gang of Four, English Beat, The B-52s, The Police and The Talking Heads, the last of which put on . . . well, I’ll get to that in a couple of years.

It was a bit of a miracle that Pleasant Dreams got made at all, as something happened at that time that forever changed the trajectory of the band: Joey’s girlfriend Linda — for whom he had written “Danny Says” — left him for Johnny.

This, of course, is the type of incident that usually wipes bands out, but like The Rolling Stones before them, the Ramones believed so much in their core mission that they soldiered on for another 15 years, Linda eventually marrying Johnny. And while people often thought that the pummeling “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was about all of this, it was supposedly written years earlier.

And so the Ramones soldiered on into the 1980s, following the Phil Spector-produced End of The Century with the far less bombastic Pleasant Dreams, their sixth album, and the first that didn’t feature a full-band shot on the cover. It was also the first Ramones album where the credits listed who actually wrote the song, as opposed to the Joey-Johnny-Dee Dee-Tommy credits of the first four albums and the Joey-Johnny-Dee Dee credits on End of the Century.

All of this reflected internal tensions that we will discuss more fully tomorrow, but in a weird way, it meant that Joey could now take full credit for his songs that posited the Ramones as the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll, like the opening track, “We Want The Airwaves.”

So yeah, while I wrote about the Heartbreakers version of “Chinese Rocks” about a thousand songs ago, I love the Ramones version enough to also write about it.

Given that L.A.M.F. wasn’t released in the U.S. at the time — well, shit, I did some digging on Discogs, and I can’t find a U.S. release at all for L.A.M.F, and that can’t be right — the version on End of The Century was the first one I heard. And it was one of the harder rockers on that record, Phil Spector staying relatively light-handed so that Joey could sing the incredibly dark lyrics.

Yesterday, I called End of the Century “a mess,” which is true, but at least it gave us Joey’s heartfelt and ultimately tragic “Danny Says,” on the shortlist of Prettiest Songs Ever Recorded, Ramones Division.

While on paper, the concept of Phil Spector producing the Ramones must have made sense to everybody involved. These days, End of the Century just sounds like a fucking mess. The only reason it resonates at all 40 years later was that the songwriting was still pretty good, even if two of the best songs, “Chinese Rock” and and “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” predated the sessions and the other two — “Danny Says” and “Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?” featured instrumentation that would have been unthinkable just a year prior.

Probably the toughest-sounding song on Road to Ruin — though that might be just because it was in the center of the pure pop “I Wanna Be Sedated” and the acoustic guitar based “Questioningly” — “Go Mental” juxtaposes an utterly diamond-hard riff from Johnny with Marky and Dee Dee continually smashing the beat against your head.

While it was never a hit, the endlessly catchy “I Wanna Be Sedated” has essentially become one in retrospect. That sometimes happens, of course, and in a weird way, the story of “I Wanna Be Sedated” mirrors the rise of the Ramones from commercial failures to eternal icons.

And why not? From the very opening, “I Wanna Be Sedated” is a massive hook machine, Johnny playing brightly muted surfy chords over which Joey sings the chorus first.